On Tuesday night Gamestah hosted our sixth evening of the Gamestah Ember Series. We were blown away by a sudden increase in Twitch viewers, peaking that evening with 374 people watching our stream live. We ended the evening feeling quite pleased with how things were going with Ember, assuming that the boost was a reflection of our consistent broadcasts with high production value as well as the fact that we were on Twitch’s front page, which usually attracts an upswing in viewer numbers.

But as the saying goes, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Over the last few days I’ve been digging into our stats and I have come to the conclusion that we have been victims of view-bots. Consider the following graph:

I’ve charted two sets of stats:

Max Concurrents – these are the numbers of viewers that show up in the live Twitch channel. It shows the peak each week during Ember broadcasts.

Unique Visitors – these are the numbers of connections to our channels from unique PCs/locations.

As you can see, there is quite a leap on Ember 6 in terms of Max Concurrents, but not as much of a leap in Unique Visitors. I believe this shows that someone pointed view bots at our channel and artificially boosted our max concurrents.

Gamestah’s official position regarding view botting is this: we do not condone their use at all. View bots artificially inflate some statistics for a channel, giving the appearance of greater popularity without actually providing a proper measure for how well the channels broadcast is doing.

We have noticed over the last week that several other HotS channels in the ANZ region have also experienced a similar phenomenon (at least two channels). Our advice is that they check their stats similar to what we have done here.

And to the person that is directing aimbots at ANZ HotS channels: just stop. It’s not welcome and we don’t need the artificial inflation of our stats.